THE Grieg

I'm spending this weekend playing the Grieg concerto with the Houston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Susanna Mälkki. It struck me recently for some reason that virtually all piano concertos in the central repertoire are from families: Rachmaninov's 3rd, Beethoven's 5th, Mozart's 21st; only the Schumann (although there are two other concertante works), the Dvorak (still a rarity, if unjustly so), and the Grieg stand alone. In fact the latter almost stands alone in the composer's entire output.

The young Edvard Grieg: PHOTO Selmer

Written in his mid-20s, the A minor Piano Concerto is a gloriously fresh and touching work, full of distinctive melodies underpinned with original harmonic colours. It has a spirit of innocence and honesty – warm without being overheated, intimate without being invasive. It is often said that it was modeled on the Schumann Piano Concerto, but I really don't see this … except that they are in the same key and they have a similar opening trademark flourish followed by the first theme stated in orchestra then piano. The key progressions in the two pieces are different within the movements, and between the movements, and … well, I can't see any other similarities between them actually. I will record the Grieg next year with the Bergen Philharmonic and Andrew Litton – a rare occasion when an orchestra could probably play the piece from memory in the dark.
Thirty years after writing his famous concerto, Grieg wrote the Notturno op. 54, one of the most beautiful of his Lyric Pieces and something I often play as an encore. In this work, written in the evening of his life, he quotes his early concerto, and it is a heartbreakingly sad moment in this tender piece. It's almost as if the composer is letting us see into his soul where he might have realized and regretted that his early promise never quite came to fulfillment. If Wagner had died at the age Grieg was when writing his concerto he would scarcely be a footnote in musical history; if Grieg had died after writing that final triumphant A major thematic statement which Liszt so admired I think we might have seen him as potentially one of the greatest of all composers. But in the end it doesn't really matter: one masterpiece is enough for any life.